Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Tommy Lee Jones on his striking, darkly funny directorial debut. Plus: Two movies tailor-made for fans of the truly peculiar.
Dec 15, 2005 | If I ever interview Tommy Lee Jones again, I'm going to try to outdress him. This won't be easy, because I don't own, and never have owned, the clothes that would permit me to do that. Many people in the movie business affect a studied casualness -- I once interviewed Nick Nolte when he was wearing a turquoise surgical smock and glasses stuck together at the nose with Scotch tape -- but not Jones.
He shows up for our interview in a Manhattan hotel wearing an exquisitely tailored pinstripe suit and pearl-gray tie. Coupled with his mellifluous West Texas accent, this makes Jones look more like the CEO of an oil company -- or, say, the president of the United States -- than a gruff 'n' growly character actor who's played several dozen federal marshals, prison wardens, military officers and other morally ambiguous authority figures.
But then, one of the things that has made Jones such a potent screen presence -- along with his deadpan delivery and weathered Mt. Rushmore visage -- is the fact that he's an unclassifiable, sui generis figure in real life. Born into an ordinary Anglo family in rural West Texas (although he's of partly Cherokee ancestry), Jones was something of a golden boy, attending a prestigious boys school in Dallas and then Harvard, both on scholarships. His roommates in Cambridge included John Lithgow and Al Gore, who remains his close friend. He played on the offensive line for the Harvard football team that rallied furiously to tie Yale in 1968, one of the most famous games in that storied rivalry.
Given that background, Jones could well have been expected to end up in business, law or politics, wearing $3,000 suits and charming or intimidating various grades of lesser mortals with that voice. Instead, he launched himself into showbiz immediately after graduating from Harvard, acting on the New York stage and in television before getting his first movie role in 1970, in "Love Story." After 35 years as a pop-culture fixture, with an Academy Award for "The Fugitive" in 1993 and a serious payday for his roles alongside Will Smith in the "Men in Black" franchise along the way, Jones has finally moved behind the camera.
Jones actually directed a TV film for Ted Turner in 1995 ("The Good Old Boys"), but "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" is clearly his coming-out party as a filmmaker, and it's a striking if not altogether surprising event. Big in both scale and ambition (and a thoroughly independent production by anybody's standard), the film is a social comedy about the ambiguities of the Texas-Mexico border region and also a laconic, masculine odyssey into the hinterland between the two nations, between life and death, between identity and disintegration.
As you'd expect, Jones has a marvelous eye for acting and for the gritty, seriocomic touches that make the town of Van Horn, Texas, feel both wide open and claustrophobic. What you might not expect is the persistent strain of dark humor that runs through the film, or the cut-up chronology that will make you work to string the story's narrative together. (This last may well be the influence of Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who scripted "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams" for director Alejandro González Iñárritu.)
The influence of Sam Peckinpah, and also of Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa, on the spectacular wide-screen images of the Texan-Mexican desert captured by Jones and cinematographer Chris Menges has been universally noted. But "The Three Burials" strikes me in the end as more a blend of literary and mythological ingredients, as Jones largely acknowledges. Jones himself gives a memorably precise performance as Pete Perkins, a ranch hand who has promised his undocumented Mexican co-worker, the eponymous Melquiades (Julio César Cedillo), that if anything happens to Melquiades, Pete won't allow him to be buried "among the billboards" (i.e., in the United States). I think it's giving nothing away to tell you that Melquiades is shot by an amped-up Border Patrol officer named Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), whose quality time with the women of Hustler magazine is rudely interrupted by what he thinks are shots fired in his direction. As we skip forward and backward in time, Pete begins to work out what has happened to his friend, Mike and his superiors try to cover up the crime, and what passes for Van Horn's community is dragged into the drama.
Jones' cast includes a wonderful performance by Melissa Leo as the town's archetypal truck-stop waitress, January Jones as Mike's lovely but supremely alienated wife (who knows Melquiades a little better than she's likely to let on), and Dwight Yoakam, sporting a pencil-thin mustache and a series of unflattering shirts, as Van Horn's eternally frustrated sheriff. Jones and Arriaga never surrender the farcical elements of this story, but all these characters eventually move toward something like escape or redemption or at least momentary grace.
For Pete and Mike, the journey is a bit more literal: Pete forces Mike to disinter Melquiades' increasingly unpleasant remains, and accompany him on horseback across the Rio Grande to the Mexican state of Coahuila, where he hopes to find the dead man's wife and hometown. There's a bit of Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" and a bit of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" in this voyage, not least in the fact that its true purpose and destination become ever less clear. If Mike comes close to death and must depend on Mexicans he has previously brutalized, Jones' Pete must also face his own terrible loneliness, and learn that he never knew his dead best friend well at all.
If "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" has some languid patches, it's also a work of uncommon maturity and remarkable poetry. More actors, I suspect, should wait 35 years before directing their first feature. Hell, more directors should too.
